Before our invention IBM has created through the work of many highly talented engineers beginning with machines known as the IBM System 360 in the 1960s to the present, a special architecture which, because of its essential nature to a computing system, became known as “the mainframe” whose principles of operation state the architecture of the machine by describing the instructions which may be executed upon the “mainframe” implementation of the instructions which had been invented by IBM inventors and adopted, because of their significant contribution to improving the state of the computing machine represented by “the mainframe”, as significant contributions by inclusion in IBM's Principles of Operation as stated over the years. The First Edition of the z/Architecture Principles of Operation which was published December 2000 has become the standard published reference as SA22-7832-00. The first machine to implement both binary floating point BFP and hexadecimal floating point HFP architectures in hardware providing a floating point unit was the 1998 IBM S/390 G5 Processor.
A hexadecimal dataflow is used which requires binary operands to be converted to hexadecimal operands before they are operated on. The HFP instructions are capable of performing one add or one multiply per cycle with a latency of about 3 cycles. The BFP instructions can only be pipelined one instruction every other cycle and the latency is 5 or 6 cycles due to the extra conversion cycles and rounding cycle.
We determined that further new hexadecimal floating point instructions would assist the art and could be included in a z/Architecture machine and also emulated by others in simpler machines, as described herein. Improvements have been made to the Floating Point Unit itself.